As Sandhurst marks its 200th anniversary, the prospect of active service has
boosted numbers of officer cadets, but how will the military academy fare in
the future?

Early on a golden summer morning, the next generation of Britain’s Army officers are plunging waist-high into a stream that marks the border between Surrey and Berkshire.

Just like previous officer cadets who have attended Sandhurst over the past two centuries, nine platoons are competing in the annual 'log race’ – taking it in turns to carry a massive log and an ammunition box over several hundred agonising yards of the Royal Military Academy’s grounds.

No one seems able to recall how this tradition began, or what it is supposed to test, although the commanders looking on say it is not dissimilar to evacuating a casualty from the battlefield. It is a short race, but running in waterlogged clothes while being pulled from side to side is exhausting.

Like many of Sandhurst’s most feared rituals, it is about fitness, stamina, teamwork and 'character’ – a term that here seems to mean nothing more complex than carrying on when every instinct is to give up.

As the race reaches the final straight just outside the Georgian columns of the Old College, the shouts of encouragement and guttural moans rise in a crescendo. A few seconds later the winners huddle in a frenzy of backslapping; the losing platoon collapses in dejection. Two cadets, bent double with pain, vomit on the parade ground.

Sandhurst has been described as 'Hogwarts with guns’, with its portico and columns, endless sports fields, arcane regulations, compulsory chapel, school-dinner catering and sports ancient and modern – from beagling to mountain biking.

And, like a particularly forbidding public school, the 44-week commissioning course, which every regular officer in the British Army has to pass, is spoken of in terms of quiet dread.

Each year Sandhurst is charged with producing 554 new officers to 'fulfil the structural needs of the Army’. The Army will accept applicants between the ages of 18 and 26, and the average age of Sandhurst graduates is about 23.

Foreign cadets, who pay fees of £48,000 a year, make up 10 per cent of the intake and currently come from 34 countries, from Afghanistan to Yemen. Some are promising entrants to overseas armies and are well suited to the course; others are the offspring of ruling elites that use Sandhurst as a finishing school.

These days 54 per cent of Sandhurst cadets attended state schools, and 84 per cent have degrees. While at the Academy, graduates such as the Duke of Cambridge earn £25,000, compared with £16,000 for non-graduates such as Prince Harry.

After 'commissioning’ – on the stroke of midnight at the Sandhurst Ball following their passing-out parade – officers have to serve at least three years, but most serve longer. A good officer can move from the rank of second lieutenant to major within eight years.

It is 200 years since the Royal Military College was established on 700 acres of poor-quality farmland to train 'gentleman cadets’ for the infantry, cavalry and Indian Army on a site close enough to London for senior staff to travel to Whitehall, and far enough to shield cadets from its temptations.

The clamour for its creation came after the disastrous Flanders Campaign of 1794 against Napoleon’s well-drilled forces exposed the British Army’s lack of training and poor equipment.

A parliamentary inquiry after the debacle found that soldiers had been badly led by the sons of landowners who had bought their commissions and often had no military experience.

John Le Marchant, a British cavalry officer who had been riled when an Austrian officer compared British swordsmanship to a 'farmer chopping wood’, persuaded parliament to grant him £30,000 to establish a Royal Military College for the instruction of officers. The original academy was set up in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, before moving to Sandhurst in 1812. Le Marchant was the first lieutenant governor.

Although the buttery stone of the Old College is as pristine as it was 200 years ago, inside there is a shabby-at-the-edges grandeur.

This is a museum of British military history, with cannons captured at the battle of Waterloo and display cases of the child-size uniforms and mini muskets used by teenage cadets two centuries ago. In the Old Chapel is a memorial window to soldiers lost in Afghanistan and Waziristan (from the 1910s rather than the 2000s).

Lt Col Charlie Lambert, the Commander of New College (KALPESH LATHIGRA)

In his dimly lit room full of heavy furnishings, with a Jack Russell at his side, I meet Lt Col Charlie Lambert, the commander of New College, who is responsible for the cadets in their second and third terms. They are tested on fitness, military skills such as map reading, using a radio, and their ability to write, listen to and deliver orders. More important, however, seem to be the intangible qualities.

I ask Lt Col Lambert what he is looking for in his officer cadets. 'Has someone got the ability to rush about, carry weight and still have the breath in their lungs to command and lead?’ he replies. 'How badly do they want to do this? You’ve got to put pressure on to make sure that, however good their ability, their motivation is enough to keep going.’

Three quarters of cadets pass the course first time around, while about a quarter are 'back-termed’ (forced to repeat a term) if they are injured for more than a week or if they are not progressing quickly enough. Overall, nine per cent of those who start the course fail to commission.

'I’ve had people in the senior term say, “I’ve always had niggling doubts, and the more I see of it I know it’s just not for me,”’ Lt Col Lambert says. 'The morality of killing is a big question for people. Amazingly some people don’t think about this until they get here.’

Unlike other officer academies around the world, Sandhurst uses senior soldiers (colour sergeants, all of whom have had operational experience in Iraq or Afghanistan), rather than officers, to train officer cadets in the ways of marching, boot-polishing, weapon-holding, bayonet use and general soldiering skills. It makes for interesting rank distinctions.

Cadets at Sandhurst refer to each other as 'Mr –––’, never by their first names.

Theoretically, the colour sergeants, since they are addressing an officer, should call their cadets 'Sir’, even when reminding them of their shortcomings at ear-splitting volume.

As one of the colour sergeants told me, 'There’s a famous quote by one of my predecessors in the 1950s who called every officer cadet “Sir”, and he said to his cadets, “You’ll call me 'Sir’, I’ll call you 'Sir’, but the only difference is, you’ll mean it.”’

The initial five weeks at Sandhurst are the toughest. When the cadets arrive on their first day (nicknamed 'Ironing-board Sunday’, as they have to bring their own ironing-board to Sandhurst) they are immediately thrown into a world of 'marching, ironing and shouting’ – in the words of one alumnus. Room inspections can be so thorough that cadets have to measure the exact distance between toothbrush and toothpaste on their shelves.

It is common for newcomers to sleep on the floor rather than ruin their bed blocks, painstakingly prepared the night before. Aside from the two hours of daily drill, there are toilets to be scrubbed and 'litter sweeps’ to perform.

Though much depends on their colour sergeant’s temperament, the list of forbidden items is long: mobile phones (though they are released after 10pm), chocolate, alcohol, facial hair and romantic liaisons on Academy grounds.

Fifteen minutes is allocated for breakfast, and cadets can be made to down a full litre of water before the day starts. Drill involves the mind-numbing tedium of 'marking time’ (marching on the spot) for long stretches. In Sandhurst’s dining-hall I meet a group of cadets in the final weeks of their intermediate term at Sandhurst – already they have assumed the air of confident veterans when discussing their first few weeks at the Academy.

Humphrey Bucknall, the 20-year-old son of a general, who is joining the Coldstream Guards, denies that the reality is as bad as the myth: 'Getting yourself into the routine is a nightmare – bashing the civilian lackadaisicalness out of you and learning what the colour sergeant’s version of tidy is compared with yours. But as long as you’re not the slowest person in the platoon, you’re fine. Unless you do something fantastically bad, you won’t get shouted at.’

Officer cadet Humphrey Bucknall (KALPESH LATHIGRA)

Adam Siggs is, at 26, older than the other officer cadets. He has been promoted from the rank of corporal in the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. 'The colour sergeant gets quite aggressive at times,’ he says. 'But it’s not the way that people expect. They definitely speak to us like we’re adults – we’re constantly assessed, but if we do something wrong, it gets noted.’

Ten per cent of Sandhurst’s cadets are women. Though still prohibited from serving in the Infantry Regiments and Royal Armoured Corps, the female cadets perform all the same tasks and cover the same distances on exercise, although they carry less weight. 'We do “gender fair”,’ Lt Col Lambert says. 'The fittest and toughest girls are as strong as the average bloke.’

The women form their own platoon. Like all Sandhurst cadets, they stay with the same platoon throughout their three terms. 'If you’ve come from a mixed school, to be in such a small, concentrated group [of women], especially with the lack of sleep, can be quite interesting,’ Kirsty Clafton, 23, an Edinburgh graduate who is joining the Royal Engineers, says.

'If you’re in a close-knit platoon you get the best friends you’ve ever made, but also the worst enemies. You can’t get away from them because they are there every evening. It’s very good for improving your leadership skills.’

I ask the cadets why they opted for the privations of Army life. Following a maths degree at Edinburgh, Kirsty Clafton had already filled a wardrobe with business suits and was two weeks away from starting a job in an accountancy firm when she changed her mind. 'No other career offered me the diversity that the Army did,’ she says. 'The thought of being stuck behind a desk terrified me,’ she says.

Now that British operations in Afghanistan are winding down, would they be disappointed if they were not deployed into a war zone?

'That’s the job we’ve signed up for,’ Sarah Hunter-Choat, 24, who is joining the Intelligence Corps, says. The most immediate concern is not their own safety, but how, within weeks of leaving Sandhurst, they will cope with commanding a 30-strong platoon.

'A lot of the soldiers will have several tours under their belts,’ Humphrey Bucknall says. 'What can I bring to the party? You’ve got to have faith in the training and selection that you can lead young men.’

Cadets in the mess hall at Sandhurst (KALPESH LATHIGRA)

Later I catch up with the group as they take part in a classroom exercise, Operation Agile Influence, in which they role-play a British Army intervention in a complicated civil war. Although the location for the exercise is in the fictional Suleman province, it seems to owe a lot to Afghanistan, with a dash of Somalia and Nigeria thrown in.

Up until now, the Sandhurst course has focused on traditional military skills, but this is preparation for the knotty missions that they are likely to be involved in. In the final term, they will try these lessons out over 10 days in a replica Afghan village at Longmoor, Hampshire, known as 'Hampshiristan’.

The cadets, some of them wearing headscarves for the day, are split into groups to play the participants in a conflict. There are the local police; a group of Christian refugees huddled in a big canvas tent erected in one of the classrooms; a major NGO; reporters from a local radio station; an international newspaper on the ground (the 'Washington Patriot’); and Muslim village elders. Each group is given a scenario to act out, with their own prejudices. They don’t all tell the truth when talking to the Army, so this is a chance for the cadets to learn how to decode the vested interests of the various parties.

As the scenario unfolds, random events are thrown at the cadets, and they have to decide how much weight to attach to them and how to react. Far away in the province, a flash storm has caused a bridge to collapse – should they prioritise resources to fix it, which would win them favour locally, or would that be a distraction from their main task?

The previous night the soldiers came under attack, and two aid workers have gone missing. The local Muslim police are scapegoating the Christian refugees for the attack, and the soldiers have to balance getting to the truth with maintaining relationships with the police. Simon Taylor, one of the civilian academic staff, is senior lecturer in Sandhurst’s Department of Communication and Applied Behavioural Science. 'We are trying to build emotional intelligence,’ he says. 'They are told to walk in others’ shoes – to think like them, act like them and make decisions like them.’

It is not a straightforward situation to navigate: 'If you’ve accused the police of corruption at the start of the exercise, that won’t help you when you need them to help you move people after a flooding incident later on,’ Taylor says. The natural 'can do’ response of the Army cadets does not lend itself to the slow, murky morality of a civil war. 'They often have a slam-dunk attitude, like we all did in our 20s,’ Taylor adds. 'But life is not black and white. They have to understand that they’re not going to get

everything their own way. If you want to solve a problem in five minutes and move on to the next, your problems will keep multiplying. And if you’re making decisions like this when you’re rested, you’ve been fed and you’re in a warm, dry classroom, how will you react when you’re cold, wet, tired and hungry and you’ve lost two soldiers in a bombing?’

Brecon is a place name spoken with dread in the British Army. We have taken a fork off the public road, deep in the Brecon Beacons, on to an Army-vehicles-only dirt track. As if on cue, heavy spots of rain hit the windscreen. This is part of the Sennybridge Training Area, 30,000 acres of purple heather, woodland and freezing streams, devoted to infantry training.

We are here to see the Junior Term out on exercise, 13 weeks into their training. It is the fourth day of a five-day exercise, and the cadets have been sleeping in 'harbours’ – trenches that they have dug themselves, which are sodden with rainwater. This exercise tests how well they can cope in the field – whether they can stay dry, perform their foot inspections, and heat their chilli tuna pasta and Gurkha curry ration packs. They are also taking their baby steps as troops on the ground – learning their light infantry formations (on this exercise they will be firing blanks) and coping with night-watch 'stag rotas’, which seem designed never to allow more than a few snatched minutes of sleep.

'We’ve been getting two hours’ sleep a night and had torrential rain,’ the officer cadet Alex Shand says. 'It’s been grim. We’ve been doing half hours, and no matter how many times you do it, you never get used to the cold and rain.’ Shand, 25, who wants to be an officer in the Royal Engineers, has been appointed from the ranks and has already done a tour of Afghanistan. 'The worst three words you’ll ever hear are, “Your stag, mate”,’ he says.

Capt John Jeffcoat, a Tiggerish officer from the Royal Gurkha Rifles, assesses their progress: 'It’s like learning to drive. They’re very much at the mirror, signal, manoeuvre stage. We’re teaching them to relax when they’re under pressure: deal with it, don’t get into a flap, take a deep breath and carry on.’

On this exercise the cadets have to attack enemy positions, which are played by Gurkha soldiers. They could be ambushed at any time, day or night. They inch forwards in tactical formation around the edge of a copse, their faces covered by combat paint. But they have been spotted. The tinny ring of incoming machine-gun fire carries on gusts of wind. A colour sergeant is shouting orders at the cadets: 'If you’re doing drills, you get under cover, Mr Sullivan, you know the f***ing score.’

As the platoon hits the wet earth and they begin returning fire, spent magazines spill out into the undergrowth. 'Why are we not moving? Keep the enemy guessing,’ the colour sergeant yells. 'Aim through your sights and keep your head down.’

Officer cadet Kirsty Clafton (KALPESH LATHIGRA)

Eventually the platoon can see the target – a machine-gun nest behind some sandbags on top of a hillock. To mask their final attack, they release a smoke grenade. They ascend the mound, firing all the way, until their Gurkha foe 'dies’ theatrically. After they have cleared the position, checking for other enemy soldiers, the cadets sit in a circle for a debrief and a smoke.

In a nearby stone barn with a bare concrete floor, Maj Gen Tim Evans, a former SAS officer and now Sandhurst Commandant, is eating lunch with senior officers – a lukewarm chicken pie with soggy chips from a box in the back of a Land Rover. He is clipped and intense, and when he calls for quiet ('Gentleman, quiet please!’), silence breaks out.

I ask him whether a more soft-edged and liberal society has had any impact on the raw material that comes through Sandhurst’s gates. 'Inherently, at their core, I don’t think the cadets have changed,’ he says. 'The young officers in Afghanistan are serving with distinction, so the system is working. But because of their education and the way they’ve been brought up at home, they might not be as mentally or physically attuned and done as much as we expect them to. But we’ve got the 44 weeks. We don’t pamper, it’s quite tough, but you don’t need to break someone in the first five weeks.’

Over the past few years, after a period when Sandhurst struggled to fill every place, there has been an upsurge in numbers, attributed by Maj Gen Evans to the impact of the recession and the enthusiasm among young people for seeing active service. But Afghanistan has been a double-edged sword for recruitment: 'The gatekeepers are concerned about operations. Parents don’t want their children to join.’

For the past decade officer cadets coming through Sandhurst knew that they would, within a year of commissioning, be deployed to Afghanistan. Now, with the withdrawal of British troops looming in 2014, the future is largely unknown. 'The pendulum will swing quite quickly from an expectation that everybody will go to Afghanistan to an expectation that nobody will go. In one year, three years or five years, it could be southern Sudan, Somalia or Syria,’ Maj Gen Evans says. This means that the training cannot be focused solely on Afghanistan. 'We’re mindful of the fact that this isn’t pre-deployment training for Afghanistan – this is officer development and we’re here to develop leadership.’

In 1975 a Panorama film crew visited Sandhurst, showing a class-bound and self-consciously old-fashioned institution that was struggling against the anti-war, leftist political spirit of the times. Although nearly two thirds of cadets were from state schools – slightly higher than today – the 1970s Sandhurst experience was, according to the BBC journalist Michael Cockerell, 'inseparable from the process of creating a gentleman’.

Maj Gen Tim Evans, the Commandant of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (KALPESH LATHIGRA)

Patrick Mercer, now the Conservative MP for Newark, was shown in the programme as a breezily confident teenage cadet, straight out of school. I asked him what he could remember of life at the academy. 'For me, Sandhurst was like a muscular public school,’ he said. 'We were very much young gentlemen who turned up there. They spent an awful lot of time teaching us how to behave like officers, saluting and paying compliments.’

The atmosphere sounded far more congenial than the conditions cadets report today. 'I was expecting lots of cleaning of floors and boxing of blankets, instead of which we immediately had servants given to us,’ Mercer recalls. 'We had to make our beds tidily, but there was no question of standing to attention and having your room inspected – nothing like that.’

But none of this was good training for a deployment six months later. 'There seemed to be any amount of time available to do damn silly things, such as how to be a sentry outside Buckingham Palace and practise holding the regimental colours. But nobody taught me how to use a hand grenade or bayonet,’ Mercer said. 'By golly, I felt exposed when I went to my battalion. I knew absolutely nothing of the practice of operations in Northern Ireland, into which I was pitched, literally immediately after I left the place. My commander told me to ensure that the soldiers’ rifles were zeroed [with the sights pointing in the same direction as the barrel], but I had no idea how to zero a rifle. He said to me, “F***ing hell, Sir, what have they taught you at Sandhurst?”’

These days any talk of educating gentlemen has gone, despite the fact that public schools still produce a hugely disproportionate number of Army officers. More officers are promoted from the ranks, and the training is at least as disciplined and physically demanding as the basic training for soldiers. But Patrick Mercer’s complaint that the course did not prepare him for operations can still be heard today. Patrick Hennessy, in his bestselling 2009 book, The Junior Officers’ Reading Club, complained that he was taught more about the Cold War and chemical and biological warfare than the kinds of conflicts that he would be thrown into in the Middle East. 'Sandhurst justified the lack of mission-specific training it delivered; it was a generic leadership academy,’ Hennessy wrote. 'Specific instruction… building bridges for Engineers and counter-insurgency for the Infantry would come later. It never did.’

Since then there have been changes: Sandhurst now teaches officers to cope with guerrilla warfare, counter-insurgency, NGOs and journalists as well as Russian tanks. On the day of my visit the officer cadets were learning to recognise the smell of crack cocaine in case it is smoked by the troops under their command.

Over the past 50 years Sandhurst has fended off attempts by politicians to turn it into a tri-service academy training officers from the RAF and Navy as well as the Army, and a 1960s plan to transform it into a military university. The institution seems impregnable for the foreseeable future, although with the Army shrinking by a fifth, to 82,000 by 2020 (redundancy notices are already being handed out), there will be fewer regular cadets passing through, and more of the reservists who, under government plans, are to bolster the smaller regular Army. Perhaps some of the class of 2012 will have shortened careers; in the latest round of cuts, the Army lost 300 officers.

A cadet arriving at Sandhurst in 2012 will sleep in the same rooms, look out over the same parade ground, post letters in the same crimson pillar box and sit in the same chapel pews as his or her predecessors over the past two centuries.

But there are subtle differences. Dr Anthony Morton, the curator of the Sandhurst archive, is in a good position to judge how the officer cadets have changed over time, having read the diaries and college magazines of successive generations.

In the 1960s and 70s the vast majority of the cadets were school leavers, who had a reputation for practical jokes, including, in 1956, blocking the nearby A30 with Napoleonic cannons: 'They were quite immature,’ Dr Morton says.

'They got up to japes and were still behaving like teen-agers. Nowadays they are more mature and get their noses to the grindstone. In the 1970s the school leavers took being shouted at. Now the colour sergeants treat cadets differently.’

I ask another academic, who has taught at Sandhurst since the 1980s, what differences he has seen among the cadets. 'Thirty years ago,’ he says, 'they wouldn’t have dared ask, “What’s in it for me?” But now they will.’